Webflow vs WordPress, from a designer’s point of view

WordPress.org is the software. It is free and open source, and you host it yourself. To run it you supply hosting, a domain, PHP 8.3 or greater and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 or greater. The software costs nothing; the bill is your host’s, and it varies enough between hosts that any comparison page quoting one number for it is guessing.

WordPress.com is Automattic’s hosted service. It has its own plan ladder, from a free tier on a WordPress.com subdomain with ads, up through Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce. Read from Europe that ladder runs EUR 4 to EUR 45 a month billed annually, and we have not converted it because WordPress.com serves the page by region.

Two thresholds on the hosted service are worth knowing because both are widely reported wrongly. Plugins are available on every paid plan, from Personal up — not Business-only. SFTP and SSH are Business and Commerce only. So the tier where WordPress.com stops being a hosted CMS and starts being a server you control is Business, at EUR 25 a month billed annually.

Free software is not a free website

WordPress.org costs nothing to download and that is genuinely remarkable. It is also not the number you should budget with. A running WordPress site needs hosting, a domain, a PHP runtime and a database, plus the updates and backups that come with owning it. The honest comparison is Webflow’s $15 a month against a hosting bill plus your own time, and how those add up depends entirely on which host and how much of your time you count.

What you get for that is the thing nothing else in this comparison offers. Nobody can raise the price on software you already have, change its terms, or wind it down — which, given that another builder we compare against is being switched off in 67 countries this month, is not an abstract advantage.

The CMS comparison is not close

Webflow’s Basic plan explicitly excludes the CMS. Premium at $25 a month billed yearly carries 40 collections and 20,000 items with a structure you define, which is a good CMS. WordPress is a publishing system that grew a page builder later — posts, pages, taxonomies, revisions, scheduled publishing, multiple authors, unlimited, on every tier including the free software.

If the site is a blog, a magazine, a documentation set or anything with editors and an editorial calendar, this row decides it and the rest of the page is detail.

The design comparison is equally not close, in the other direction

Webflow gives you a visual style system with breakpoints, and what you build is what you drew. WordPress gives you a theme. Matching an approved design means finding a theme close enough to adapt or building one, which is development work rather than design work, and there is no Figma import to shorten it.

That is the actual trade. One product is better at publishing and one is better at looking like something specific, and almost every real project leans clearly one way.

Who has to keep it running afterwards

A Webflow site has nothing to update. A self-hosted WordPress site has core, themes and plugins on their own schedules, and that maintenance belongs to whoever owns the site. WordPress.com takes that away, at the cost of being a hosted service again — and below the Business tier, one without SFTP or SSH.

The flip side is people. There are more developers who can pick up a WordPress site than for any other platform on this website. For a client handover with no ongoing retainer, that is worth more than the editor.

What is WordPress?

Two things with the same name. WordPress.org is free, open-source publishing software that you install on your own hosting. WordPress.com is Automattic’s hosted service, which runs that software for you on its own plan ladder. Both are “WordPress”, and almost every argument about what WordPress costs or allows is really an argument about which one is meant.

Is WordPress free?

The software is, completely. WordPress.org is free and open source, and there is no licence to buy. Running it is not free — you supply hosting, a domain, PHP 8.3 or greater and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 or greater, and you carry the updates and backups. WordPress.com also has a free tier, but it publishes to a WordPress.com subdomain with ads, gives you 1 GB of storage, and allows no custom domain, no plugins and no custom themes.

Is Webflow better than WordPress?

For design control, for a site you do not want to maintain, and for anything coming out of Figma, yes. For a publication, for a site that needs a specific plugin, or for one you want to own outright, no — and not by a small margin either way. They are aimed at genuinely different jobs.

Why choose Webflow over WordPress?

Three reasons that hold up. The layout is built visually rather than inherited from a theme, so an approved design survives. There is nothing to update, because the hosting is Webflow’s. And the Figma path exists — a free two-part Webflow Labs app syncs components, variables and styles, where WordPress has no Figma route at all.

How do I migrate from WordPress to Webflow?

There is no one-click route. In practice you export the content from WordPress, rebuild the design in Webflow, then map the content into Webflow collections and set up redirects so the old URLs still resolve. The design is a rebuild either way — a WordPress theme is not something Webflow reads. Budget for the redirect map, because that is where the traffic is actually lost.

How do I migrate a WordPress blog to the Webflow CMS?

You need Webflow’s CMS, which means Premium at $25 a month billed yearly — Basic explicitly has no CMS to import into. From there it is a content migration: export the posts, shape them into a Webflow collection with matching fields, and import. Check the item ceiling first. Premium carries 40 collections and 20,000 items, which is plenty for most blogs and not for an archive with two decades in it.

Both products above assume the site is a system that produces pages. If yours is the opposite — a designed set of pages that already exist in Figma, with nothing to publish and nothing to maintain — Siter.io imports the frame and puts it online from $7/mo billed yearly, priced per plan rather than per site: Plus at $12 a month publishes 3 sites.

The gap here is wider than on any other page we have, so it is worth being blunt. No CMS or blog, and WordPress is the best CMS in this whole comparison set. No e-commerce — listed as upcoming, with no date. Three fixed breakpoints. The free plan builds and previews privately; publishing needs a paid plan. If there is a blog, an editorial calendar or a plugin you depend on, this is not a close call and you should stop reading here. Our Webflow comparison sets out the same trade against the other column.